This was my longstanding answer to what my dream project would be. But at this point I think I'd be too worried I'd screw it up. There's a short film called Yearbook that played at Sundance a year or two ago that is probably as good an adaptation (unofficial though it may be) as possible, even though it's only 5 minutes long.

The second annual Oak Cliff Film Festival kicks off Thursday and runs through the weekend, with filmmakers from Texas and other locales stopping by. But for all of the festival’s variety, the event is shaping up as a showcase for one red-hot native son.

That would be David Lowery, the prolific 32-year-old Irving High School graduate currently leaping onto the national stage. His latest feature, the Texas outlaw romance Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara), played Sundance and Cannes this year and will be released by IFC in August.He’s now at work on a reimagining of the Disney favorite Pete’s Dragon and the Robert Redford project The Old Man and the Gun, based on a New Yorker article about a septuagenarian bank robber. Redford will star and produce; Lowery will write and direct.

Lowery has long been tight with the Aviation Cinemas crew, which runs the film festival and the Texas Theatre. So his footprint on the festival comes as no surprise. He’ll host a screening of the dreamlike Robert Altman Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller at 7 p.m. Friday at the Texas Theatre, then return at 9:30 p.m. for a “secret screening.”Keith Carradine will attend. He’s in McCabe. He’s also in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.

Lowery’s plate is fuller than a buffet platter. He uses a different dining analogy to describe his work habits.“I’ve always taken a kind of Lazy Susan approach,” Lowery says. “You get to a good point on one project, and then you do some work on the next one, and then later in the day you work on the next one. There’s actually plenty of time if you just utilize it well.” He pauses. “Which I’m terrible at doing.”With his thick facial hair and old-soul bearing, Lowery looks like he could have stepped out of a Civil War photograph. He’s soft-spoken and slightly overwhelmed, though it’s not as if he came out of nowhere.

Lowery is known around Texas as a do-everything guy quick to take work on other people’s projects. He was all over this year’s Sundance catalog: In addition to writing and directing Saints, he co-edited Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and co-wrote Yen Tan’s Pit Stop, which won the Dallas International Film Festival’s Texas Filmmaker Award. “My intent was always just to help out on films that I like and help out friends who were making films,” he says.Now his creative karma and focus are paying major dividends.

“He’s skyrocketing right now,” says Aviation’s Adam Donaghey, the executive producer of Lowery’s 2009 feature St. Nick and a high school friend from Irving. “It all stems from his relentless execution of his own style. He just did, and kept doing it, and somebody finally saw it.”That style, much like Lowery, is quiet, patient and soulful; it makes sense that he counts McCabe & Mrs. Miller as a favorite movie, and that Saints has drawn comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick.

Lowery simply isn’t very Hollywood. But unlike other locally raised filmmakers, including Yen Tan and David Gordon Green, he hasn’t decamped for the higher-profile Austin scene. He calls East Dallas home and sounds as if he will for a while.

“I like that Dallas is off the beaten path, as far as the entertainment industry goes, but is still culturally ahead of the curve,” he says. “I get everything I want out of a big city while also managing to remain somewhat invisible. It has plenty of art house theaters, great vegan food and great coffee. And lots of friends.” He should expect to see plenty of them over the weekend.

The team that made Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is partnering for a thinking man’s sci-fi tale.

Saints helmer David Lowery has closed a deal to adapt and direct To Be Two, an adaptation of a short story from the Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology collection by Paul Broks.

Casey Affleck is attached to star and is set to executive produce with Lowery, Toby Halbrooks and James M. Johnston of Sailor Bear. Halbrooks and Johnston were producers on Saints, which opened in theaters last weekend.

Jim Wilson is attached to produce and Silver Reel will finance script development.

To Be Two adapts the short story To Be Two or Not To Be and deals with identity and the self. It’s set in a world where teleportation exists and people are scanned, the digital self sent to Mars, reconstructed atom by atom, while the original is vaporized. The story then posits the idea of the teleportation machine malfunctioning and not vaporizing the original person. Who is now real? And how do experiences make them different? And what happens when the authorities want to erase the original person?

The tone of the adaptation is said to be similar to Looper, Rian Johnson’s time traveling movie that saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis play the same person from different decades with different agendas.

Lowery wrote and directed Saints, which stars Affleck, Rooney Mara and Ben Foster, and garnered much acclaim when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. The movie opened from IFC last week with many critics comparing the filmmaker to Terrence Malick.

Since the Sundance unveiling, WME-repped Lowery has booked a gig to write Disney’s reimagined version of Pete’s Dragon with Halbrooks, and is attached to adapt and direct The Old Man and the Gun, based on a 2003 article in The New Yorker. Robert Redford is attached to star.

Affleck is next set to star in Relativity’s Out of the Furnace and just began shooting Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi adventure movie. He is repped by WME and Ziffren Brittenham.

Silver Reel is a fairly new financier on the scene that focuses on development. The company recently teamed with Colin Firth's Raindog Films on the $30 million spy thriller A Foreign Country. Among the other titles it has worked on are the Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie Maggie, Nicole Kidman’s Grace Kelly biopic Grace of Monaco, and TIFF title Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson.

Halbrooks, Johnston and Sailor Bear are all also repped by WME. Broks is repped by RWSG.

As a side note, Lowery has teamed up with his filmmaking pals Destin Daniel Creton, Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard, all of whom have buzzy indie movies (Short Term 12, Drinking Buddies and You're Next, respectively) hitting theaters this weekend, for a little quadruple promo.

The filmmakers are promising that, if you see all of their movies and have the receipts to prove it, prizes like a hand drawn illustration from Lowery, a handpainted animal mask from Wingard and a signed coaster from Swanberg can be yours.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

ohhh wow. i know exactly what this is getting into. some heavy research for lowery, i wonder how he'll approach that. for example, if we were a group of people interested in this topic on a regular basis, the conversation would have already exploded

the basic can be quickly explained: neural science is like weather. in science, the easiest thing to say is it's like weather, because of what happened to weather in the 60s-80s: the chaos theory. science couldn't figure out how to forecast weather. science figured out all these other things, but landed on the moon before figuring out weather. tremendous complexities to weather, from all parts of the biosphere

people are still like that -- how do you forecast a person? such complexities. and neural science explores those complexities

i haven't read broks but i immediately see that as a scientist and writer he used transportation to mars as a way to share the complexities and communicate them to non-science people. what i mean is, traveling to mars is not at all the conquest of human survival. space travel is necessary for humans not because space travel is fun, but because our sun will die. the way things are now, there's a sad fear that our planet will die before our sun will, but either way. a famous early narrative of this plight was of course written by asimov, the last question, and of course everyone was excited when stephen hawking himself noted this, that we need space travel

to me it's interesting that blok reconfigures his narrative strategy in order to increase his focus (a travel to mars is easier to understand than a travel to a planet we're not familiar with, and his big question is about how we are people). the overlap between modern science questions and philosophical questions, and the unique portrait chosen, excites me because there's definitely the potential for lowery to treat it not as the typical sci-fi "this is the future, this is how it will be," but to treat it as if it's a single step toward a long future that can't at this point be alltheway seen. i say this because i saw saints. this futuristic movie could be treated like a historical movie

i can tell you it's the cusp of science fiction right now, it really is. looper, ok, this is different, pacific rim, ok, this is different

It's nothing like Looper, actually. We used that as a budgetary reference, which i think is how it got into the report, but this is gonna be its own thing. The short story is an exploration of ego theory vs. bundle theory, and that's the central concern of the movie as well.

It's gonna be great.

If I had my druthers I'd shoot this and the Redford movie back to back next year.

not because in imaginary land you're standing right in front of me, but on the basis of the ideas being targeted, i can't think of a recent scifi movie that held this degree of exploration. be prepared: if they called you malick before, they're going to call you tarkovsky now

It's nothing like Looper, actually. We used that as a budgetary reference, which i think is how it got into the report, but this is gonna be its own thing. The short story is an exploration of ego theory vs. bundle theory, and that's the central concern of the movie as well.

Yeah, if anything it reminds me of the surprising turn of events that occurs in Christopher Nolan's fifth film.

It's nothing like Looper, actually. We used that as a budgetary reference, which i think is how it got into the report, but this is gonna be its own thing. The short story is an exploration of ego theory vs. bundle theory, and that's the central concern of the movie as well.

Yeah, if anything it reminds me of the surprising turn of events that occurs in Christopher Nolan's fifth film.

Which I haven't seen, but need to - Modage mentioned to me that there might be some similarities.